Interstellar Travel

36% of Americans believe in UFOs, that is, though most Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are actually explained as such mundane things as misidentified meteorological phenomena, astronomical phenomena, aircraft, and so on, there's ~ 5% that are as yet unexplained and that these unexplained UFOs are machines from somewhere other than Earth.

Have you ever observed a UFO that has never been sufficiently explained? Do you believe that some unexplained UFOs are machines from somewhere other than Earth? If so, why (what are your reasons or arguments for believing so)? What evidence is there to support your belief?

And 90% believe in a deity of some sort without objective evidence. That looks real bad for the flying saucers.

...that is, though most Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are actually explained as such mundane things as misidentified meteorological phenomena, astronomical phenomena, aircraft, and so on, there's ~ 5% that are as yet unexplained and that these unexplained UFOs are machines from somewhere other than Earth.

Given how hard it is to get to the truth about what fallible eyewitness testimony actually saw, a "95% explained" figure is pretty impressive. Occam's Razor says the rest are simply the sightings we don't have the necessary information to properly identify, rather than space buggies from planet Streibertron.

Have you ever observed a UFO that has never been sufficiently explained?

No, but I debunked one at the tender age of seven--there had been a two-day UFO flap in my neighborhood and my babysitter and her boyfriend saw one of the objects while out doing, um, stuff one night; being a known space nerd kid with a working (small) telescope, I got a call that night after they fled home in terror from the approaching Romulan armada. They told me where to look by phone, the object--a bright starlike light--was easy to see from my backyard, and through my telescope it was obvious that they were looking at Venus (then in a gibbous phase). They didn't believe me, of course, because the object they saw was moving around jerkily in the sky, unlike a bright planet. Odd, since Venus was clearly (pun intended) what they were looking at. A year later, I learned about autokinesis and that completed the solution to the mystery.

Do you believe that some unexplained UFOs are machines from somewhere other than Earth? If so, why (what are your reasons or arguments for believing so)? What evidence is there to support your belief?

No, and others have given good explanations as to why above. I'd only add that if the aliens had the ability to cross between the stars and wanted to be unseen, they'd be able to pull it off. If they wanted to be known, we'd never be able to hide from them. And if they didn't give a shit, we'd see lots of objects in earth's skies that didn't look like planets, meteors, returning space junk, indoor light reflections, aircraft (I can't tell you how many times I've heard stories of UFOs with red, green, and white lights on them) or spacecraft from the Hollywood Galaxy.

Note--I noticed the New Zealand 1978 flap referenced above. I saw a photo promoted of one of those UFOs a long time ago--it was a round glowing sphere with a dark spot in the middle. It was obviously an Airy disk (an out-of-focus point source of light viewed through a telephoto lens), which made the photo a product either of incompetence or deception. I gave up on that sighting right then and there.

During HS, a friend and I were out walking late summer, a little before sunset, and noticed that there were two suns, one above the other. It was very beautiful, and ahw inspiring. WOW

I and my mother were out in our garden about 1970. We were weeding and mom looked up to see what seemed to be a huge dark gray craft in the east moving slow SE to NW. We watched it for a while, then heard what seemed to be a jet engine sound coming from that direction. As we watched, the shape resolved to what looked like one of the large troop carrier aircraft, but it seemed huge from where we were.

While on a camping trip with my 'pre-wife', we camped out up a logging road in our van. We were most likely at about 2500ft, surrounded by trees and open sky. Just before we went to bed, Lisa noticed a strange cloud over head, fluffy, but very uniform in shape. I mentioned, 'So its coming towards us then?' This has been a joke between us since. We sleeped soundly, with no abduction dreams.

First off, this post turned out to be mostly about UFO's and not so much about interstellar travel.

I believe interstellar travel is impossible for humans for several reasons. For other sorts of beings, perhaps not so much.

The distances are so vast that it's unlikely, bordering on impossible, for a human being to live long enough to arrive at even the closest stars, and that's even with some way of putting them in some sort of stasis. You can't freeze people solid, so somesort of metabolizing will have to go on, even if it's very slow.

In order to get anywhere in any kind of reasonable time, one would have to move at fairly close to the speed of light. This, combined with the fact that outer space isn't really empty, creates a very high likelihood of colliding with something. Even if something like a large asteroid could be detected and avoided before a collision, what about objects the size of soccerballs, baseballs, or marbles. Even a dust cloud could do a fair amount of damage to a craft moving that fast.

There's an ethical question involved in sending out a long-term space colony, since they will be having children and, in effect, those children are kidnapped on a mission taking away from the choice of living a normal life on humanity's home planet.

Alien beings with far longer lifespans might want to visit us and be able to do it, but I can't imagine why, unless we have a resource they want to take away from Earth.

I agree--if anything from earth ventures forth to the stars, it won't be humans in our present form. We're tied to the planet we evolved on for now, except for temporary jaunts into the solar system. The same holds true for alien intelligence; I have no doubt there are other planets inhabited by intelligent beings but unless they make themselves somehow more optimized for long-duration living in a deep space environment, they're stuck too. Which has me wondering if a truly interstellar species, should it exist, even care about life at the bottom of gravity wells like planets.

The only point of disagreement I have is whether aliens will find it worthwhile to cross the stars in search of resources, since the difficulty of such travel cancels out the benefit of transporting the resources home. If aliens are that desperate for earth stuff, I'm guessing they'll just move in for good. Hopefully they'll be polite and ask first...

I also didn't get into gamma ray radiation which is virtually impossible to defend against in any practical way.

That depends on how much radiation there is. Mass blocks it, but the more intensive the radiation, the more mass you need. Build the living quarters inside a shield made of depleted uranium a hundred feet thick and you'll do well enough. You did say 'practical' but what is practical changes as technology advances. Maybe it would be practical in the year 3013.

I think that's why we'll need to engineer new types of human beings before interstellar travel becomes practicable for us. Organic life is poorly suited for space travel but a technological copy of a human mind-- essentially a sentient machine-- would be made for it (quite literally).

We are already turning to robots for space exploration. However, don't forget that gamma rays also adversely affect electronics, so the same sort of very heavy shielding a person would be required, the next problem being that all that weight requires more fuel than otherwise and would be needed and the craft would take significantly longer to get up to speed.

When thinking about fuel, don't forget you'll need about the same amount of fuel it took to get you to your destination to slow the craft down, unless you just want to do a very very quick flyby and not stick around to explore at all.

We can dream (and should), but realistically speaking, we are trapped in this solar system. We're not going anywhere beyond it, ever. I doubt if we'll ever get people much beyond Mars, which itself is a dangerous place due to lacking the sort of magnetic shield we possess here on Earth.

I attended a lecture about 1973, given by a researcher from a food study and preservation laboratory, I think Dr. Jesse Bone. He was also a science fiction writer, writer of 'Nobel Red Man', with the theam of nuclear war survival.

He was studing the effects of gamma ray sterilization of foods at the time, and had, in a few samples, found one bacteria species that could survive extreame gamma ray exposure. If memory serves, he mentioned that there was a compound related to a mercaptan, that had a large radiation shielding/absorbtion capacity. I do not know what has happened since, maybe this is a datum that has been lost due to intellectual snobbery? I don't think my memory is weak on this point, I was very amazed at the idea and result being a nerd and all.

Given my inability to scare up relevant links to Dr. Bone's theories, I take it there isn't wide acceptance of it.

Intellectual snobbery or intellectual skepticism. Science doesn't change instantly with every new theory or new test result that comes along, and that's the way we want it. The fact that we no longer believe we are the center of the universe, that bumps on the head can tell you about a person's personality and intelligence, that we no longer imagine that "humours" are a cause for disease, and many other big changes over the years shows that science can change when the evidence becomes irrefutable.

I find it hard to believe that anything can survive intense gamma ray exposure, but if someone can show me actual evidence, I'm willing to reconsider.

If memory serves again, the good doctor was a researcher at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR. It has been a very log time since his presentation, but I remember it well. Maybe look for retired OSU researchers, Food Science. That was long ago, maybe his papers were never uploaded, but an OSU library search might dig them up, then inter-library loan.